Retro-gaming wall art; it’s playable!

Here’s a wall hanging for the reception area that let’s your customers play retro games while they wait. To give you some sense of scale, the buttons to the right (labeled Start/Jump but we would call them A and B) are arcade buttons larger than traditional arcade buttons. The screen itself is a Samsung widescreen computer monitor — we’d wager that it’s a 16″ model but we’re just guessing. It’s held in the wooden frame by a piece of angle bracket.

This is the product of a hack we looked at in June where an Arduino was used to control digitized retro LCD games. The same hardware is used, monitoring the buttons with the Arduino and using a Python script to translate them to keypresses on a computer. That means this isn’t a standalone, but needs a computer to run the game and feed the LCD monitor. Still, we love the look of it and hold out hope that this will someday migrate to FPGA control (they have not problem driving LCD screens) with selectable games.